ETH welcomes the ERIS Consortium to the Hönggerberg!

On 19-20 July, approximately 30 scientists and engineers representing five partner institutions met on the ETH Honggerberg campus to review progress on the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) under development for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

The ERIS consortium, comprised of the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (PI: R. Davies), the Institute for Astronomy at ETH Zürich, INAF Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, and ESO, is building the new instrument to be utilised with the adaptive secondary mirror under development for deployment on the UT4 of the ESO VLT. ERIS will be a powerful capability for high contrast imaging to discover and characterise extrasolar planets available to NCCR PlanetS researchers. First light is expected in 2020.